


bloody noses & cracked crowns

by mspennydreadful



Category: Alias (TV)
Genre: Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-06
Updated: 2015-04-06
Packaged: 2018-03-21 13:42:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3694418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mspennydreadful/pseuds/mspennydreadful
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set during Season 5's 'No Hard Feelings'.</p><p>Sydney's hands almost shake when she’s passed the framed Page 47 and sees her own face staring back at her, spattered with Nadia's blood. She tastes bile and aches to lash out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bloody noses & cracked crowns

_This is no world_  
_To play with mammets and to tilt with lips._  
_We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns,_  
_And pass them current too_

\-- Shakespeare: Henry IV Part I

  
Sydney had gone to Sloane's house upon hearing the news, so genuinely surprised that she had to see it with her own eyes to believe it. (She'd honestly thought he'd changed -- how could she have been so stupid?) That room -- once a library, now an abattoir -- will haunt her dreams for years to come, she’s sure of it. The glass is shattered and there's so much blood (her sister's blood, she thinks and wails inwardly) that it fills her nose with the stench of it and she can see Danny, cold and still in the bathtub again and she has to turn away, vomit rising in the back of her throat.

Later, she sees the gouges in her sister's throat from the glass, and -- having seen everything, from the way he had been around Nadia, to all that blood -- Sydney cannot truly think that this was anything but an accident, a horrible, tragic accident.

Given all the damage he's done over the years, it's a little ironic that it is this accident that she cannot forgive him for. Maybe it means that she's becoming more like him -- he always flattered himself to believe he had shaped her into the woman she is, and she always struggled to defy that, but maybe this time she is becoming like him.

The difference between them has always been her compassion, a trait that life as a spy has continually tried to beat out of her. Perhaps it should have where he was concerned: she had told him once he'd never, ever have her trust again, but he had regained it. She had believed in him and Nadia was dead because of it.

(She realizes that she has missed the clarity of hating him.)

She should have stopped him years ago. It has always been her responsibility, and one she has shirked for too long, through too much bloodshed. That is how she finds the strength to kiss Vaughn goodbye and trust the daughter she has left behind at home to her father's guardianship -- because she must.

Danny. Francie. Emily. Dianne Dixon. Nadia -- twice, now.

How many faceless others have died because of him, because she didn't prevent it? A plague on her life, she called him once, quivering with fury: all he's ever done was scrawl tragedy through her life in the bloody, dangerous words of a madman prophet who should have died when they burned him as a heretic.

(In her mind, Rambaldi wears Sloane's face -- the benign insincere smile, hiding his forked tongue behind white teeth. She hates them both.)

*

The estate in Zurich is sprawling, old-world European glamour; she doesn't know how it could have been any other way. It's a fitting back-drop for the sorts of people involved in these age-old schemes and lies, she thinks, following Peyton into a sitting room.

She sees him, his back to her, facing the fire and everything snaps into sharp relief.

"Sloane's here."

"Of course," Peyton purrs, and Sydney realizes her mistake instantly: she hadn't intended to speak aloud. It was just shock. He turns towards her and approaches, talking too coolly, standing too close to her. Only years of training keep her from reaching through the distance that separates them to kill him. She offers Anna's thin-lipped smile, attempting the predatory satisfaction she'd seen on Anna's face over the years; he flinches a little, imperceptible to those who don't know him well. Peyton probably misses it, but it feeds the malice that curves her lips like that.

She twists the knife and watches his eyes go cold: "We should celebrate, Arvin. Sydney Bristow is dead."

Her eyes pull him in and hold him there, her mouth twisted into a cruel mockery of a smile while his jaw works. Sydney wonders if the regret he masks almost well enough is because he didn't get to kill her himself, or out of concern for what it could mean to Rambaldi's prophecies.

(Sydney's hands almost shake when she’s passed the framed Page 47 and sees her own face staring back at her, spattered with Nadia's blood. She tastes bile and aches to lash out.)

Sloane speaks to her of Rambaldi and she cannot help herself. She is incredulous that after everything, his belief in Rambaldi endures. (Nadia must have died for that belief, she thinks and hates him a little more.) It's a careless slip, though. Sydney remembers, too late: it was on Anna's hand that she first saw Rambaldi's eye.

Her heart pounds as he stares at her, and she's convinced he sees her for who she is... but he says nothing and she offers a mercenary's reasoning. It covers her slip and has the added benefit of making him clench his jaw in anger as she reduces Rambaldi to a commodity. Sydney revels in the taunt, blaspheming against his terrible faith.

She can feel his eyes burning into her back as she leaves the room, pondering all that has been told to her. (She used to do this all the time -- look him in the eye and lie blithely. Why is she so convinced he'll see through her this time?)

*

On the plane, he asks her how Sydney died and she nearly gives herself away (again) in her shock. "Why do you care?" she asks, incredulous, because she cannot not ask, even though she's supposed to be Anna, even though giving herself away would be stupid. Is that grief in his eyes, roughening his voice?

(She'll never really understand Arvin Sloane, she realizes. She never has.)

Sydney spins him a cruel tale because hearing she met an ignoble end seems to pain him. "Sydney Bristow wasn't a martyr or a legend." She finds herself voicing that which she's wanted to scream for years. Ever since she saw her face on that damned page for the first time, so many years ago, she's wanted to rail and scream at Rambaldi's dupes: "She was just a person." Not their Joan of Arc or their sacrifice -- just a person, with free will and choices and who wanted nothing to do with their madness.

"She died just as easy as anyone," she says, thinking of Francie, Emily, Diane, Nadia, and when he walks away she can finally breathe again.

*

The old man in San Cielo; the clock-maker in Positano who died at Anna's hands -- it's all unfolding with such synchronicity, such familiarity and so many echoes of all that came before that she finds it frightening. She's a double agent again, deceiving Sloane to his face and hunting down his Rambaldi artifacts, pretending to ignore the blood on his hands. (The hatred she feels is dizzying, and it too feels like the return of an old friend.)

Her portrait on a wall in an ancient prison as opposed to a manuscript. Talking to Vaughn in whispers at a news stand, pretending to be strangers. Even the return of Anna, or Sark's stupid fluffy haircut (it always made him look about twelve, she thinks viciously). There's Isabelle, who is a firm anchor to the present -- but Danny had wanted kids, too. "One day," he'd said, stroking her stomach, "there's going to be a baby in here." He'd been right and she'd wept to think of it after Isabelle was born.

The old man, the Rose, tells her she can't stop what's coming. She hates that word: can't. You can't do this, you can't do that, you can't be an agent and a mother, can't, can't, can't.

"Watch me," she'd told her mother.

"You don't know me very well," suffices for the Rose, whose smile is tired and old and more than a little patronizing.

"I used to believe as you do -- that there were decisions to be made. But in the end, it's just... fate. It's out of our hands, and now it's just a matter of time. Until the stars fall from the sky. Until the end of light."

His words echo in her head as she races back to her cell, feet beating out a tattoo on the ground that matches her pounding heart. She hopes that extraction will come soon to provide her with something else to focus on, rather than all these coincidences and questions and doubts.

*

Sloane is waiting for her back at her cell, and she's barely through the door when he demands, "Were you successful?" There's an edge of madness in his voice and it occurs to Sydney to be frightened of him. His eyes are fierce as he speaks again, demanding, "Tell me, Anna, did you retrieve the Rose?"

"No," she says, squinting in the half-light -- what's that in his hand? "There was nothing there."

"Ah." His jaw tightens, and then he's standing close, too close. "I don't believe you."

Electricity rips through Sydney's body, centering at her gut where he jabs her viciously with a tazer that she later swears looks more like a cattle prod. She doubles over, tumbling to the cot, gasping in pain and staring up at him and all she can see of him is variations on light and darkness and it's all so perfectly vivid, so operatic -- that everything else should come full circle and that she should find herself at his mercy -- that she's afraid she's going to die here.

Isabelle, she thinks. I have to get home to Isabelle.

Another zap, and then he pushes her onto her back and for a split-second another fear rips through her, a fear borne of years of his eyes on her body, his heavy, unwelcome touches on her shoulders or back. His hands are warm on her body as he pushes her limbs out of his way and easily retrieves the amulet she had hoped to hide with her body.

"Sydney deserved better than an anonymous bullet," he growls, and she reels at his words, stupefied -- what would he care? she's been a thorn in his side for years! -- but still fighting to her hands and knees. "You didn't even have the courage to face her."

She makes it to a sitting position unmolested and stares at him, body trembling from exertion, trying to divine the truth of what the hell is going on from his cold, dangerous eyes. (He's never looked at her like that, not ever.)

"At least I look you in the eye," he continues and she gasps as his hands grip her throat hard, pressing into the flesh.

He's killing Anna for killing me, she realizes as she struggles against him, body weakened from the tazer, legs struggling for purchase on either side of him, her hands shaking against his wrists. He's avenging my death by killing me, she thinks, confusion and terrible clarity enveloping her like the grey starting to form at the edges of her vision.

An alarm blares and he hesitates, just long enough for her to headbutt him hard, sending him staggering backwards. The attack was instinct and, she realizes a second too late, distinctive. Sydney's shaking with adrenaline and pain and rage, and she growls at him, "I don't die that easy!"

And suddenly he knows. (She half-thought he'd known all along; the look on his face now is enough to tell her that he really hadn't -- that she'd deceived him all over again.) If he hadn't known from the attack, from the way she had moved, so like herself and not at all like Anna Espinosa, he knows now from the way she spat those words at him -- he stares at her like a revelation, the coldness in his eyes changing to something like tenderness --

(She's never understood Arvin Sloane)

\-- and then a guard is there, urging him out of the cell. She moves to follow, scrambling to her feet: he has the amulet and he mustn't get away with it, mustn't get back to Prophet Five with it or the knowledge that she's alive. The guard, however, has other plans and Sydney's body screams at her as she fights back with all her strength. (She's losing, she can feel it, but she doesn't stop fighting.)

Gunshot.

Vaughn's there, standing over the fallen guard. It took too long, though -- Sloane's surely gotten away by now, she thinks, leaning on the supportive arm offered by Vaughn. My guardian angel, she remembers and tucks away that thought along with all the others. They escape the prison through the ducts, Dixon with them and all her thoughts are deafening, spiraling around from the horrible synchronicity of it all to Sloane and his ever-opaque plans, to the need to just get home and cradle her baby girl in her arms and hope to hear one of those precious giggles in person sooner rather than later.

*

Later, they're together, finally, the three of them -- a proper family. She got to watch Vaughn fall in love at first sight, as she had done, with the most wonderful little girl in the whole world. She got to watch tiny hands reach out for Daddy and a face-cracking grin light up Vaughn's whole face.

She'd gotten so used to missing him, to aching for his absence, that having him here to touch, to kiss, to watch hold their daughter is strange and beautiful and she's happy about it, so happy, in spite of everything.

(There's a weight on her heart that she ignores. She's learned to steal the happy moments where she can find them)

They lay side by side, with Isabelle between them, doting on their child. Two new parents, proud and joyful.

But then her neck and shoulder twinge, protesting the angle she was attempting to move to, and she can feel Sloane's hands at her throat again, can see the grief and madness in his eyes. She doesn't look at Isabelle, thinking these things.

"We came so close, Vaughn," she says softly, in spite of their promise, needing to voice this deep regret. She won't speak of her confusion yet, muddy the waters. "Sloane. Prophet Five. They're still out there." (It feels like the collapse of the Alliance and SD-6: a victory, but not a complete one, and she's lost in conflicting emotions.)

"Hey," his tone is gently reproachful -- as she knew it would be. It's been years since they bickered hard, attempting to talk over one another. "I thought we agreed -- tonight it's just us, okay?"

He's right, and Sydney takes a deep breath and compartmentalizes it all like a good little agent and smiles, determined to focus on being happy and being a good mom tonight. Isabelle shifts a little in her sleep and starts to snore and suddenly it's easier to let the ugly emotions run off her back like rainwater and remember she's counting her blessings tonight.

Her phone rings.

She masks her immediate thoughts from her face -- she knows who this is going to be, who it has to be, because if Vaughn realizes, too, he'll stop her from taking this call. And if it's important enough to him to call her, with events unfolding as they have, then it's important to her to take the call.

Without bothering with caller ID, she picks up. "Hello." Neutral voice: not a question.

"It was you, Sydney. Of course." His voice is in her ear, and every muscle in her body crackles with sudden tension. "How could I have ever thought otherwise?"

She keeps her face and breathing unemotional, listening to Sloane's soft purr and clenching her jaw just a little as it all washes over her, leaving her feeling just a little dirty. "I saw it in you the first time we met," he continues, and she wonders just when he means -- when she was a small child, his best friend's little girl, possibly as small as Isabelle, or when she reentered his life as a young woman and became his protégée?

"You're a survivor, just like me."

(Maybe she is becoming like him. Maybe they do have things in common, she thinks, and wants to shower before touching her child again.)

"And now, thanks to you, I have everything I need." He falls silent, waiting for her response.

Years ago, she would have growled and hissed and threatened him, promising to stop him, to punish him for all that he's done to her and those she loves. Those days are gone. Sydney is silent; she listens to him breathe on the other end of the line for one or two more moments. Then she hangs up the telephone and sets it back down on the countertop.

It's a victory, but a small one, and she can imagine the intrigued confusion on his face, wherever he is, half a world away.

"I am not a part of the battle to come," the Rose had told her. But she is, Sydney knows in her heart, knows it's inevitable but still refuses to cheapen all of this by dismissing it as fate. Battle lines are being drawn and the masks and veils of espionage are being pulled back to show people's true faces. It's cause and effect -- everything they've done, each of them, and everything Rambaldi has written which acted as catalyst to so many terrible things, has put them on this road. It's not fate: she could still turn away from this path, take her little family and disappear. But she's not one to leave things undone. The outcome isn't certain, either way: she doesn't believe in Rambaldi's prophecies, in spite of everything she's seen. What she believes in are people, and she knows she'll be seeing Arvin Sloane again, soon.

"Who was it?" Vaughn asks, barely looking up from Isabelle.

"It doesn't matter," she tells him, and returns to playing with their little girl.

Come what may, she thinks, at least I have this moment.


End file.
